58 pages • 1 hour read
Yvon ChouinardLet My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Pages 25-104Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “History”
Part 1, Pages 25-39 Summary
Growing up in Lisbon, Maine, Yvon Chouinard admires his French-Canadian father’s toughness and skill in a number of trades. Chouinard dreams of becoming a fur trapper when he grows up. At the age of seven, Chouinard and his family move to Burbank, California. After the predominately French-Canadian Lisbon, Burbank feels alien to the young Chouinard. Bullied for his small size and inability to speak English, Chouinard retreats to the outdoors by himself, developing an unusual independence throughout his childhood as he spends every day “gigging frogs, trapping crawdads, and hunting cottontails with my bow and arrow” (29).
Chouinard remains a misfit into high school. He excels in athletics but crumbles under pressure, deciding as a result that it is better to invent his own game so he can always win (29). He finds his people in the alternative “game” of falconry. With his falconry club, Chouinard catches and trains his own bird and also helps establish the first falconry regulations in California.
Chouinard is introduced to climbing through falconry—he learns to rappel down cliffs to the birds’ aeries. He and his friends quickly become enamored with rappelling itself, developing new equipment so they can descend faster and faster. In his first years of climbing and rappelling, the inexperienced but bold Chouinard has a number of near-death experiences. These don’t deter him, and he spends more and more time in the mountains, where at 17 he also learns fly-fishing, which becomes a lifelong obsession.
At 18, Chouinard moves to the Yosemite Valley and teaches himself blacksmithing so he can make a new type of piton for himself and his climbing friends who want to scale the massive walls. The European pitons widely used then are soft and meant to be left in the rock. Chouinard and his friends, steeped in the writing of naturalists like John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, believe people shouldn’t leave a trace when they visit nature. This leave-no-trace philosophy leads Chouinard to invent a steel piton that is over seven times more expensive than the iron European ones but that is strong enough to withstand multiple uses, allowing climbers to remove them as they climb.
Chouinard lives a vagabond’s life, supporting himself off the equipment he sells from the trunk of his car, which also includes a new, stronger carabiner that he developed. For food, he scavenges through dumpsters and traps squirrels. He and his Yosemite friends revel in their rejection of consumer culture and their embrace of the rules of the outdoors: self-sufficiency, resilience, and adaptability.
Part 1, Pages 40-87 Summary
In 1962, Chouinard is drafted and hastily marries a woman he barely knows before he is sent to Korea. He hates the structure of the army and shirks his duties to climb peaks outside Seoul with Korean climbers he’s befriended.
Two years later he is honorably discharged, to his surprise. He returns to a failed marriage and goes immediately back to Yosemite, where he, Chuck Pratt, Tom Frost, and Royal Robbins make a 10-day first ascent of the North American Wall on El Capitan. Chouinard hires some friends to help him machine climbing gear and creates his first catalog, a rudimentary list of his offerings.
As demand grows, Chouinard transitions to more efficient means of production and starts a partnership with Tom Frost—his climbing friend and an aeronautical engineer—and his wife, Doreen, that lasts nine years. Their two principles of design are quality control and simplification. The former is paramount because faulty equipment could kill them or someone else during a climb. The latter they believe essential to developing perfect function in a piece of equipment. Where other companies add to their gear to improve it, Chouinard and the Frosts refine, shaving the extraneous from the essential in a Zen-inspired process.
As the business continues growing, Chouinard hires two friends, Kris McDivitt and her brother Roger. Roger has a natural talent for business, finding ingenious ways in the early days to skirt customs duties and collect payment from delinquent dealers. He becomes the first general manager and then project manager, replaced by his sister Kris.
The business is still a means for Chouinard and his friends to spend most of their time climbing. Each in turn takes months off to travel and climb while the others work. On a trip to Yosemite, Chouinard meets Malinda Pennoyer, an art student who impresses him by ripping the license plate off the car of a litterer so that she can turn them into the park rangers. They marry in 1970, have a son, Fletcher, and live in the basement under the retail store for Chouinard Equipment.
As sales double every year, Chouinard begins hiring people who don’t climb. Despite high sales, the company only has a 1% profit margin because of its rate of product development. The team will improve products before the tools used to make the originals have amortized, a process that eats into the bottom line. Nonetheless, in 1970 Chouinard Equipment is “the largest supplier of climbing hardware in the United States” (76).
The company has its first environmental reckoning: Chouinard ses that the very pitons he designed to leave no trace are now scarring rocks with holes everywhere due to the growing popularity of climbing. In response, the team designs their own version of aluminum chocks that British climbers wedge into cracks by hand, leaving the rock undamaged. The 1972 Chouinard Equipment catalog opens with a new creed of “clean” climbing—climbing that leaves the rock unaltered. The company faces opposition, but after a few months, and after Chouinard and another climber ascend the Nose route on El Capitan using only the new equipment, chocks all but replace pitons.
Part 1, Pages 88-104 Summary
Driven by a need for clothes that will function well during climbs at a time when climbers wear “tan cutoff chinos and white dress shirts bought from the thrift store” (88), Chouinard expands into clothing. At first, he repurposes corduroy pants and rugby shirts he’s discovered have good climbing functionality on trips to the United Kingdom. The colorfully striped shirts are a marked contrast to the subdued colors climbers typically wear, and the shirts sell very well. Clothing sales support the hardware side of the business, which still isn’t very profitable despite Chouinard Equipment’s having a 75% market share.
As they expand into making backpacks and a larger variety of clothes—“wool Chamonix guide sweaters, classic Mediterranean sailor shirts, canvas pants and shirts, and a technical line of rainwear—a predecessor to Gore-Tex—called Foamback” (92)—Chouinard and his partners create a separate label, Patagonia, for the soft goods, wanting to preserve the image of Chouinard Equipment as a tool company. They introduce the name in their catalog as conjuring “romantic visions of glaciers tumbling into fjords, jagged windswept peaks, gauchos and condors” (92), and they create a logo of a blue ocean with jagged peaks on a background of a stormy sky.
They soon experience growing pains and learn that expanding a clothing business presents different problems than a tool business. The biggest problem is inventory: Since they contract clothing production to factories in China—unlike the tools, which they make themselves—they can’t figure out how to keep inventory or to practice the rigorous quality control they do with their tools. This difficulty results in a large shipment of low-quality rugby shirts that nearly bankrupts the company. This financial stress splits the Chouinards from the Frosts in 1975, leaving Malinda and Yvon to manage the failing business. They hire a new general manager, but despite the company’s struggles, Chouinard resists participating in the business side of the company—averse as he is to the label of “businessman”—preferring to go climbing instead. In 1979 he appoints his early hire and friend Kris McDivitt as general manager. She secures some financing and finds a way to successfully translate Chouinard’s creative vision into a viable business.
Chouinard realizes that he is, in fact, a businessman, with employees depending on the success of his heavily indebted company. He resolves to embrace this position on the condition that he become a different type of businessman than the “pasty-faced corpses in suits I saw in airline magazine ads” (98).
Part 1, Pages 25-104 Analysis
This section, covering Chouinard’s early life through the fledgling stages of Chouinard Equipment and Patagonia, shows the extent to which his early nonconformism and affinity for nature, naturalist writers, and hand-trades shaped these two companies.
Being bullied at his new school in Burbank and his resulting retreat into the outdoors shows him that nature offers freedom from people he doesn’t get along with. It also shows him that the outdoors can be a second home to an outcast like him, and to others, as he discovers in his high school falconry club. Falconry teaches him a number of things that inform the development of his two companies. Catching and training his own falcon teach him that daunting tasks—such as rappelling down a cliff to catch a falcon in its cave—are often the most rewarding. The activity also teaches him that nature is not to be crushed to your will (you can’t train a falcon with force) but instead is something to work with, as seen in the harmony between a trained falcon and the falconer. That his club is responsible for the enactment of the first falconry regulations in California also gives him an early lesson in the power of grassroots activism: Even a group of high schoolers can effect change in legislation.
In his late teens and twenties, Chouinard develops the interests—climbing, blacksmithing, and fly-fishing—that later define his companies. In all three Chouinard finds lifelong passions, as well as the philosophies that will define his personal and corporate outlooks. Climbing and its vagabond lifestyle teach Chouinard the principles of self-sufficiency and responsible consumption. Disgusted by the runaway consumerism of the 1960s, he discovers not only that there is a cheaper, freer way to live selling homemade climbing gear and scavenging for food, but that this way of life is simpler and more meaningful to him than a conventional one. The proliferation of pitons on once virgin rock walls and his success in convincing climbers to switch to his removable piton provide his first lesson that restoring or preserving nature is not only possible, but potentially profitable. His second lesson comes when in 1970, with Chouinard Equipment the biggest supplier of climbing gear in the United States, he convinces the American climbing community to switch almost overnight to his new removable chocks that don’t scar rock with holes the way pitons do. This success demonstrates the influence he can have in the climbing community with nothing but words in his company’s catalog.
Driven in his design of climbing gear by quality and functionality—a faulty piece could kill a climber—Chouinard learns that sophistication is a process of simplification. In blacksmithing, his guiding motto, coupled with his study of Zen Buddhism and its principle of simplicity, is the words of the French aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “[P]erfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away” (95). Form should follow function, not vice versa as is often the case in fashion.
Focusing on his newly founded company Patagonia, Chouinard adjusts this minimalist philosophy but keeps its spirit. Clothing is more profitable than climbing equipment and supports that side of the business, but it can’t be refined according to the principle of function as equipment can. While the early English clothes Chouinard rebrands as climbing attire function better than what is on market, there is no reason for the rugby shirts to be striped or the corduroys to be welted in the way that there is for a carabiner to be iron and shaped in a specific way. Clothing is a diluted expression of Chouinard’s minimalist philosophy because it introduces the element of style, but in it Chouinard still prioritizes functionality.
This small compromise combined with growing business responsibilities and financial stress from the order of poor-quality rugby shirts drives Chouinard away from the company into the outdoors. The different world he’s created for himself is starting to look too much like the mainstream. Chouinard’s conflict between business and the outdoors will come to be the conflict at the center of Patagonia.
